In the still-dark hours of the morning, Edi Rama dropped the mask. No more reformist posturing, no more carefully scripted PR about “modern Albania.” Instead, the Prime Minister sent a wall of police to encircle News 24 — one of the country’s biggest independent newsrooms — and physically block journalists from entering.
This wasn’t a technical eviction. It wasn’t about leases, contracts, or bureaucratic housekeeping. It was an unmistakable message, broadcast in real time: If I can’t control your voice, I’ll silence your stage.
On the ground, the operation was led by Ardi Veliu, Rama’s ever-willing strongman. From police chief to deputy minister, from internal affairs boss to head of a state weapons company, Veliu has always been there when the job called for force over law. On this day, he didn’t oversee production lines — he turned the state’s uniformed force into a private demolition crew for press freedom.
Yet Veliu is just the executor. The author of this scene is Rama himself. Under his rule, the police don’t serve the law — they serve the man in the chair. Legal frameworks are props, pulled on stage when they fit the script, tossed aside when they don’t.
The move marks a turning point. For years, Rama’s pressure on independent media was applied in quieter ways: squeezing advertisers, freezing access, burying outlets under regulatory harassment. But the siege on News 24 is a leap into open, daylight authoritarianism. A public demonstration of territory, meant to tell every journalist in the country: Today it’s them. Tomorrow it could be you.
It’s not just the act itself, but the timing. Albania is being sold abroad as a “European success story,” complete with ribbon-cutting ceremonies, cultural festivals, and smiling handshakes. Then you have figures like Marta Kos — posing arm-in-arm with Rama and assuring audiences that “Albania is closer than ever to the EU.” These photo ops are pure theatre: staged for foreign consumption, while back home the cameras that dare film unapproved realities are being switched off by state order.
The contradiction is glaring. You can’t be on the threshold of the EU while sealing off a major newsroom with police tape. You can’t claim to champion democracy while treating journalists like trespassers.
Rama’s tactic is clear: dominate the message, own the microphone, erase dissent. But in doing so, he’s broadcasting a truth he can’t edit out — that Albania’s press freedom is under direct assault, and the government is no longer pretending otherwise.
When the lights and cameras of the international stage move on, what will remain is the image of that morning: police cordons around a news building, journalists locked out, and a prime minister willing to use the machinery of the state not for public safety, but for personal control.
And that image will outlast every press conference, every staged photo, and every hollow promise about the “European future” that is being built, brick by brick, with the walls of a newsroom.